They catch a lot of fish there, to my surprise. Tilapia, carp, gurami�these must taste exceptionally delicious when you caught them yourselves, I asked, trying to shake off the idea that the palm-sized, flipflopping fingerling I saw earlier was a dinner for four.

No, it doesn't, they said. The water is cold and dirty. The conversant boy beside me who introduced himself as JR even boasted that a man once poisoned the lagoon�well, at least part of it. The fish floated on the surface, all they had to do was to gather the kill. They ate the catch, it tasted funny and smelled nasty. But to them, it's still food.

I inquired about their parents. Most are carpenters, security guards who had to feen a brood of not less than five children.

In the course of our conversation, I just realized one thing: they never said they were poor. They appeared to be contented; a few hinted that they would like to improve their lives.

I asked how.

"Mag-aaral nang mabuti," a boy in green sando quipped.

"Nag-aaral nga ba kayo nang mabuti?" I joked.

A moment's silence, a sheepish grin, an itch in the scalp that just had to be scratched and everyone just burst out into laughter.

Eleven-year-old JR wants to become a soldier like his father who is based in Mindanao.

A man in a motorbike passed by. They pointed out that he is the park's guard who often reprimanded them whenever they were caught anywhere near the lagoon.

"Kunyari, sasaktan kami, pero sa totoo papagalitan lang," Jojo explained.

The guard passed by two more times, and twice I saw him looking in our direction. He must be checking on these boys, I thought�and wondering why I was with them.

At that, I thanked them and bade them goodbye. They called me "Ate," thanked me, too. I would have stayed on for a few more minutes, but then I saw my friends at a distance. The photoshoot was over, and in a while we would be leaving.

I just tagged along that day with a few friends who were just learning how to take good pictures. Yet somehow, even for that one late morning, I thought I learned more than they did; credit goes to the flipflopping fingerling that started it all. To think I didn't have a camera.